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A search engine is a program that can search the Web on a specific topic for you. By typing in a word or phrase (known as a keyword), the search engine will produce pages of links on that topic. Supposedly, the more relevant links are at the top of the list, but that is not always true.

Example: the Google Search Engine

An example of a search engine is the popular Google Search Engine. The homepage of this web site includes a small window, which you can type a word or set of words on a topic you are interested in.

For instance, suppose you wanted to locate information about baseball on the Web. You could go to the Google site and enter your query in the entry field:

You then press on "Google Search" (other search engines will have slightly different forms). The search engine will respond by providing you with a list of all the documents in its database that contain the word "baseball". Your browser will display a page with your keyword(s) and a list of documents in which the engine found the word(s). For a Google search on "baseball", the results might look like:

In this example, we displayed only the first few matches. Note that each match (or "hit") returned by Google has a link to a document that contains the keyword(s). The link appears at the beginning of the hit telling you the title. You can go directly to the document by simply clicking on the link. (But in this example don't try to go to the document by clicking the underlined words above. Remember this is just a "photo" of the page the engine returned, not the actual page itself.)

Sharpening Your Search

If the keyword you specify for the search is a rather common term, you may be presented with an enormous number of Web documents that contain that term. (Note that Google found over 5 million documents/links to the word "baseball") In this case many of the hits may contain the term but in only one or two instances. Rather than wasting a lot of your time looking through the long list and visiting links that may turn out to have little or nothing to do with the topic you are really interested in, you can let the search engine do the sifting by repeating your search with additional and more specific keywords.

Here are a few general tips to help your search:

• Be as specific as possible. For example, maybe you are really only interested in baseball information on the Chicago Cubs, then you should use the term "Chicago Cubs" instead of the general term of "baseball."
• If you're truly interested in the "Chicago Cubs," wrap the term in quotes. This means you want both words together. Otherwise you will pull travel web sites about the city of Chicago or unnecessary documents with information about baby bears into your result lists.
• On most search engines adding a plus sign (+) next to any term means to be sure and include the term in the results. If you want very specific information about the Chicago Cubs' 2002 season (forget their past), put a plus sign (+) next to both terms. For example +"Chicago Cubs" and +2002 means that you want only links that have both information about the Cubs and their activities during the year 2002.

These general tips work for most search engines, however each search engine may differ in how they want the user to search. Most search engines do have help files and information on advanced searching if you want to hone your searching skills further.

Other Search Engines

There are many search engines besides the Google service available on the Web. Here are the links for some other popular ones:

AltaVista (www.altavista.com)
Northern Light (www.northernlight.com)
Excite (www.excite.com)

Although there may be minor differences in the details of their use, most of these engines behave in a similar way, accepting a list of keywords from you and returning a list of documents that contain those keywords. Keep in mind that if you don't find the results you're looking for in one search engine, try another because each search engine analyzes the Web a different way.

Internet Safety

Search engines can access a broad range of material on the Web, depending on search strings used. Thus, unsupervised use of search engines by students can lead to access of inappropriate material.

It is advisable to consider this if you intend to use search engines directly in your classes (as opposed to using them to find material that you intend to use later in class). Fortunately, some search engines try to prevent this. Searchenginewatch.com has a list of the search engines on their web site that attempt to screen inappropriate material.

Also, you may find it useful to warn your students that it is possible to go back and find out from the computer which files and addresses have been accessed by the Web browser on that computer (by looking at what are called the cache files). You should also consult the discussion of netiquette and the section on Internet Safety.